The fat phase of margarine and of similar fat continuous emulsion spreads is often a mixture of a liquid fat or oil and a fat which is solid at room and/or ambient temperature.
The solid fat, denoted as hardstock fat, serves to structure the fat phase and helps to stabilise the emulsion.
Vegetable fats and oils are preferred over animal fats because their unsaturated fat composition enhances the spread's nutritional value.
The present trend in food processing is to avoid processing, particularly chemical processing as much as possible and to opt for natural ingredients and natural processing. Consumers prefer products that have natural ingredients and that have not been subjected to chemical treatment or modification.
However, natural, non-processed vegetable fats which are suited as hardstock fat are rather rare. Hydrogenating is still an often used treatment for turning liquid vegetable oils into suitable hardstock fats.
EP-A-0151450 discloses a fat blend having a relatively low level of trans fatty acids, preferably lower than 10% which is obtained by random interesterification of a lauric fat, a hydrogenated fat and a liquid oil.
Another disadvantage is the use of liquid oil because it is expected that the price of liquid oil and especially of rapeseed oil will increase due to the increasing demand of these liquid oils as so-called “biodiesel” for cars.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a hardstock fat that has not undergone hydrogenation. Another object of the invention is to provide a hardstock fat that is not made from liquid oil. Yet another object of the invention is to provide a hardstock fat that is made from less expensive ingredients.
One or more of the objections is attained by a non-hydrogenated hardstock wherein the combined amount of saturated fatty acids having a length of C12 and C14 is 12 to 24 wt %, the combined amount of saturated fatty acids having a length of C16 and C18 is 20 is 28 to 50 wt %, the amount of saturated fatty acids with a length of C18 is 6 to 12 wt %, and the total amount of fully saturated fatty acids is less than 72 wt %.